Windows 7 causes Sage 50 v2011 to slow down over network

[dd4business]

Hello,

Has anyone ever had experience of the following charateristic?

A client of ours has a small 'workgroup' network of 4 computers. Two of the computers run on Windows XP and two run on Windows 7, all pro. The clients' company file is located on one of the Windows 7 PC, which is not used as user workstation.

If only the two Windows XP client PC's are used to access the company file the users fined Sage to respond in a normal manner. However, as soon as the remaining Windows 7 client PC is used to access the company file, the performance of Sage on the two Windows XP machines reduces dramatically to a point where it is unusable. The characteristic presents itself on the Windows XP machines with a pop-up whilst switching between windows, typically with the message; ‘ waiting to open queue.dta’ but sometime with other '.dta. files.

Does someone have experience of this charateristic and did you fix it? We suspect that Windows 7 is creating so much 'chatter' on the local network that the Windows XP PCs' find it difficult to efficiently pass back and forth the changes to the company file. We have tested to see if a virus is causing this issue but all PC's check out clean and to be honest this issue has been there ever since the Windows 7 PC was installed from new, about 6 months ago.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[brucedenney]

Sounds like the SMB2 issue. Have you disabled SMB2 on all the Win7/8/Vista PC's?

[dd4business]

Thanks,

Will give that a try and let you know.

John

[brucedenney]

Try the smb2toggletoo tool from symantec if you want an easy life.

[dd4business]

Hello,

Unfortunately turning SMB off was a bad idea. Even before testing Sage we notice a significant slow down on all computers in the networks when accessing network locations and files. Had to turn SMB back on immediately. Any other suggestions?

Thanks

John

[brucedenney]

Things should speed back up a bit once the server and the workstations are set to SMB2 and rebooted.

As long as you have a mixed environment the workstations that are different to the server as far as SMB settings are concerned will perform like slugs and you will have data corruption and things will be messy.

SMB1 is not as high performance as SMB2 but it should not be a huge amount different.

SMB1 workstation talking to an SMB2 server is Bad
SMB2 workstation talking to an SMB1 server is Bad
SMB1 workstation talking to an SMB1 server is Fine
SMB2 workstation talking to an SMB2 server is Best

Turning off SMB2 is a REALLY GOOD idea as long as you have any XP workstations in your environment. As soon as everything is Vista+ sure switch back to SMB2.

If you are saying that the W7 to W7 performance was bad then I would go back and check that bother were really set to SMB1 because it sounds like one of them was not.

Note: you should also be in a Home network not a Work network as you are connecting to a "workgroup" not a "domain"